Andreas Manolis/Reuters
Bondholders argued with a Bank of Cyprus employee Thursday during a protest in Nicosia. Russian influence has complicated the possibility of a bailout.
PARIS — When German officials said they would save the euro zone at all costs, the prospect of bailing out Russian oligarchs was not what they had in mind.
But eight months before a crucial election in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing charges that Europe is doing just that as the tiny island of Cyprus, a haven for Russian cash, threatens to become the next point of contention in the euro crisis.
In recent days, Germany has signaled that it is reluctantly edging toward a bailout for Cyprus, after lifelines have been extended to Greece, Ireland and Portugal to prevent potentially calamitous defaults. While Cyprus makes up just a sliver of the euro zone economy, it is proving to be a first-rate political headache.
“I don’t think that Germany has ever in the history of the euro zone crisis left itself so little wiggle room,” said Nicholas Spiro, the managing director of Spiro Sovereign Strategy in London. “But Germany wants the euro to succeed and survive, and they are saying we can’t afford a Cyprus bankruptcy.”
But giving a bailout to Cyprus is trickier than it seems. Cyprus’s politicians would prefer not to take European money, which comes with the harsh austerity conditions that have spread misery in Greece. And they can argue that Cyprus was doing relatively well until Greece’s second bailout, when Greek government bonds — of which Cypriot banks held piles — lost considerable value.
The question of keeping the euro together had seemed to be conveniently fading for Ms. Merkel, who in the fall put her full backing behind the euro zone, quieting fears of a breakup. But Berlin seems to have been caught off guard by the political tempest stirred up by Cyprus, which has been shut out of international bond markets for a year but has been kept afloat by a $3.5 billion loan from the Russian government.
With that money running out, Germany and its European partners have been locked in a fierce debate over whether and how to throw Cyprus a lifeline. The problem is, most of the money lost by Cypriot banks was Russian, and the worry is that most of the bailout money could wind up in the hands of Russian oligarchs and gangsters. That fear, backed by a recent report by German intelligence, has stoked a furor even among some of Ms. Merkel’s political partners. “I do not want to vouch for black Russian money,” Volker Kauder, a prominent member of her conservative bloc, said recently.
The Russian presence is thick on Cyprus, a picturesque Mediterranean island and a onetime British colony. The bustling, large city of Limassol has an enclave of restaurants, shops and fur boutiques so packed with Russians that locals call it “Limassolgrad.”
Officials in Cyprus say there is no proof that the Russian cash in its banks is of dubious origin, and they insist that they cracked down on money laundering before joining the European Union. The officials point to an evaluation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showing that Cyprus is compliant with more than 40 directives against money laundering.
While any lifeline for Cyprus would be small — about $22 billion compared with about $327 billion for Greece — the quandary has reverberated in Europe’s halls of power, and especially in Berlin, which appears to have been backed into a corner by Ms. Merkel’s commitment to keep the euro zone together no matter what.
The outspoken German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, recently cast doubt on whether Cyprus should even be considered for a bailout, given its small size and the stark reality that it is not nearly as vital to the euro’s existence as the larger economies of Spain or Italy. His blunt assessment reportedly drew an admonishment from Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, which has spent hundreds of billions of euros on a program intended to discourage financial market speculators from attacking euro zone countries.
“We have reached a point of relative stability in the euro zone crisis, so letting Cyprus go could stir up the waters again and trigger another wave of speculation,” said Hubert Faustmann, an associate professor of history and political science at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus.
With Russia refusing to provide any further financing unless the so-called troika of creditors — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — provides most of the bailout, the Cypriot government has few options. It signed a memorandum of understanding in November with the troika, setting off a wave of austerity measures that are already starting to hit the enfeebled Cypriot economy.
The salaries of public sector workers have since been slashed by up to 15 percent, state pensions are to be cut by up to 10 percent and the value-added tax is set to rise. “The island has been hard hit, and there is an atmosphere of fear,” Mr. Faustmann said. “People are not sure if they will keep their jobs, and if they do, how long they will have them.”
Mr. Faustmann estimated that it would take at least a half-decade for the Cypriot economy to recover — assuming that the conditions required by Germany and the troika do not send Russian money fleeing from the banks. “If that happens,” he said, “then Cyprus is dead.”
